Friends and Strangers

Four contemporary artists look inside and outside their immediate circles to find emotional connections and build community. This film showcases playful and poignant sculptures, performances, and more. Includes celebrated filmmaker Miranda July.

Artist Miranda July walks through a busy gas station while uncoiling a roll of white ribbon, asking strangers to hold onto a part of it but feel free to let go whenever they need to. The ribbon tangles and wraps around the entire gas station. In the voiceover, July discusses how taking risks is her comfort zone and not being afraid to do so gives her a superpower to work freely.

As a muralist paints artist Christine Sun Kim’s site-responsive project at the Queens Museum, “Time Owes Me Rest Again,” Kim explains the ideas behind the piece. She used echoing motion lines to represent the five words in the title in American Sign Language, conveying the unease and fatigue many felt during the COVID-19 pandemic and the persisting inequity between Deaf and hearing communities.

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger started a series of works called “Future Ancestral Technologies,” rejecting the romantic historical narrative of native people that their culture is ancient and primitive. Through science fiction and speculative fiction presented with sculptures, videos, regalia, and performance, Luger imagines how our culture shifts in the future and what it will mean to be indigenous.

Illustrated with archival images from the 70s and 80s, Linda Goode Bryant tells the story of how she realized artists of color were not given the opportunities to exhibit their work at the time and decided to take the initiative to establish the art gallery, Just Above Midtown, which fostered a vibrant artists community and gave artists the space to exchange ideas and experiment with new work.